Has capitalism got a future? 24 January 2012Last updated at 00:22 By Tim Weber Business editor, BBC News website, Davos Could the future of capitalism be decided in this Swiss mountain resort? Has capitalism got a future? The organisers of this year's World Economic Forum (WEF) have put some pretty crunchy questions on the agenda. But as more than 2,600 of the world's richest and most powerful people come to the Swiss mountain village of Davos to discuss the state of the world, is it a topic that they want to talk about? For some, these are clearly the right questions. "I'm really interested in hearing people talk about that," he says. Mr Griffiths-Jones talks of the need to find a "concept of responsible capitalism" and worries that even if Davos man and woman find a consensus, it will not be one that is very clear to people in the wider world. The founder and driving force of the forum, Prof Klaus Schwab, is even blunter. Occupy WEF "We'll make small actions in the village. Good news Party is not over
American Class System - We Are Not All Created Equal, by Stephen Marche Published in the January 2012 issue There are some truths so hard to face, so ugly and so at odds with how we imagine the world should be, that nobody can accept them. Here's one: It is obvious that a class system has arrived in America — a recent study of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility. Hulton Archive/Getty; Oli Scarff/Getty (Cameron); Lewis Whyld/PA Wire/AP (riots) FIG. 1: Rather than fight for wages, women now argue about whether they want to be harassed at work: "Is the anodyne drone typing away in her silent cubicle free from risk of comment on her clothes, the terror of a joke, the unsettlement of an unwanted or even a wanted sexual advance, truly our ideal?" FIG. 2: Why is this man laughing? FIG. 3: The 1999 Seattle protesters had job prospects. More than anything else, class now determines Americans' fates. Not in America. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Joe Raedle/Getty
Top Three Conclusions From Wisconsin Recall Election On May 24, 2012, Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, gave an innocuous interview to a visiting journalist from Turkey. “There are a lot of good people who would love to see peace, if only the hatred that exists were to vanish,” he said. What Senator Kyl could not have known is that the “journalist” with whom he was speaking was actually part of a religious organization whose leader has spent time in jail amid accusations of extortion, forced sex, and bizarre, cult-like behavior. The apparent duping of Senator Kyl, along with several other Republican members of Congress, is but the latest the story of Harun Yahya (“Aaron John”), which refers both to the Turkish Islamist-turned-creationist Adnan Oktar, and the controversial organization which he heads. In the mid-1980s, in the context of widespread instability in Turkey, Oktar was the charismatic, educated leader of a small “born again”-style Muslim community, distinguished by the wealth and elite status of its members. Rep.
Hot times in Silicon Valley THE San Francisco Bay area is undergoing one of its periodic tech booms on the back of the flourishing of social networking firms. That boom, the Wall Street Journaltells us, is very good for local tech workers: Tech-jobs website operator Dice Holdings Inc. said salaries for software and other engineering professionals in California's Silicon Valley rose 5.2% to an average $104,195 last year, outstripping the average 2% increase, to $81,327, in tech-workers' salaries nationwide. It was the first time since Dice began the salary survey in 2001 that the wage barometer broke the $100,000 barrier, said Tom Silver, a Dice senior vice president.The findings come amid a Web boom that has fueled companies such as Facebook Inc., Zynga Inc. and Twitter Inc. Last year, several of the companies—including LinkedIn Corp. and Zynga—went public, with Facebook poised for an initial public offering this year. The question is: why is the battle for talent in Silicon Valley so fierce?
Friendship in an Age of Economics - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.c Erin Schell The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. When I was 17 years old, I had the honor of being the youngest person in the history of New York Hospital to undergo surgery for a herniated disc. We benefit from our close friendships, but they are not a matter of calculable gain and loss. The official discourses of our relations with one another do not have much to say about the afternoon my friend spent with me. The encouragement toward relationships of consumption is nowhere more prominently on display than in reality television. Entrepreneurial relationships have, in some sense, always been with us. Aristotle thought that there were three types of friendship: those of pleasure, those of usefulness, and true friendship. In our lives, however, few of us have entirely forgotten about the third — true friendship. Conversely, our times challenge those friendships. There is much that might be said about friendships.
The Growing Unemployed: A Case of Benign Neglect The high unemployment rate ought to be a national emergency. There are millions of people in need of jobs. The lost income as a result of the recession totals hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and the longer the problem persists, the more permanent the damage becomes. Why doesn’t the unemployment problem get more attention? Consider the Federal Reserve. RELATED: White Working Class: Angry, Cynical and Losing Faith Similar questions can be asked about fiscal policy. There was, of course, a stimulus program at the beginning of Obama’s presidency, but it was much too small and relied far more on tax cuts than most people realize. Republican policymakers give us all sorts of excuses for blocking further action to help the unemployed. We are also told that the deficit is too large already, but there’s still plenty of room to do more for the unemployed, as long as we have a plan to address the long-run debt problem. Forget it. But Democrats aren’t completely off the hook either.
Fear in Davos It’s highly unscientific and anecdotal, but the winner of the most-talked-about-person-in-Davos award, at least when it comes to people in my earshot, is George Soros. Soros is out of the investing game, living now as a full-time philanthropist and sage, while still keeping an eye on the fund company which bears his name and which provides him with a ten-digit income each year. Because he doesn’t have a financial book to talk, because he’s happy being brutally honest , and because he’s giving voice to the plutocrats’ darkest fears, Soros seems to encapsulate Davos 2012 like no one else. Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. No one but Soros will actually say these things, at Davos — but everybody here fears them, which is one reason why we have the slightly ludicrous sight of billionaires bellyaching about the global burdens of inequality.
Simon Johnson: What Is Goldman Sachs Thinking? The next financial boom seems likely to be centered on lending to emerging markets. Sam Finkelstein, head of emerging markets debt at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, summed up the prevailing market view - and no doubt talked up his own positions - with a prominent quote in Monday's Financial Times (p.13, front of the Companies and Markets section): "Debt-to-GDP ratios in the developed world are about double those in emerging markets and they're growing. This is a dangerous view for three reasons. First, against all historical evidence, it assumes that the only macroeconomic risks we should worry about - in general or for emerging markets - are related to standard measures of government fiscal policy. Second, emerging markets got into serious trouble through private sector overborrowing both in the 1970s (Latin America, communist Poland and Romania) and in the 1990s (many parts of Asia). Goldman Sachs knows all this, of course.